Joost decided to dump the standalone player and to offer videos only in browsers on the web interface (something like youtube). Here is the email i received today:
At this point, we have decided to discontinue our original Joost software application. As of Friday, Dec. 19th, you will no longer be able to watch videos in the Joost software application – but you will be able to find all of our videos, and more, on Joost.com.
It remains to be seen if this is a wise move or not. I liked Joost because you could find some interesting full sized videos not available elsewhere but now in the Youtube era it will be hard to compete with the already estabilished giants in the video sharing playground. Joost’s only chance is to focus on quality content because if they have it the users will come.
About the Joost website … it could have been better. It is too heavily loaded with useless stuff and it loads somewhat slow. But i’m waiting to see if this is caused by the heavy trafic they got now because of the announcement or this is a permanent issue.
Laszlo Bodor
